Tavis Smiley interviews former White House Council for the Nixon Administration John Dean. Dean focuses on the moral and legal failings of the current Administration.

Dean recalls his experiences as an insider during a Watergate and is amazed that Bush Administration has ignored those lessons. Dean expands on his March 31, 2006 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee censure hearing where he said,

No president that I can find in the history of our country has really ever adopted a policy of expanding presidential powers for the sake of expanding presidential powers. And I think that's what we have going on here in this presidency.

Dean says that the Bush inner-circle has had a policy of expanding presidential powers from "the day they took office." Secrecy was one of the symptoms of a now obvious campaign to create a presidency unchecked by government or the people. Dean says the actions of the Bush Administration have gone far beyond Nixon's "Imperial Presidency".

Dean goes on to give an ominous warning about slipping into a dictatorship:

The Congress... has lost its' institutional pride. For some reason it doesn't try to check this president.

I've seen the system how it's supposed to work and it's not working that way. When you get it lopsided and one branch is so dominating, it's something other than our founders really designed.

And, of course, the worse case is that if you go on to something that we really don't want to get to and that's a dictatorship. That can happen much more easily than one thinks.

This clip plays for about 10 minutes and was originally broadcast on Wednesday, April 10, 2006.

Prosecutor Fitzgerald needs to give immunity to Safarian to expose the Abramoff connection to the election fraud that took placehttp://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12321730/ The article in the entirety just click on the above link!!!!
WASHINGTON - A batch of 278 e-mails between lobbyist Jack Abramoff and a Bush administration official show a highly inappropriate relationship where gifts and business interests mixed freely and frequently, federal prosecutors said Friday.http://groups.yahoo.com/group/electionfraud2004/
What I want to see is the emails between Abramoff and Jeb Bush in regards to the theft of the elections of 2000 and 2004!!!!
The prosecutors hope to use the e-mails in the criminal case against David Safavian, who is accused of lying and obstruction of justice in connection with investigations of an Abramoff-sponsored golf outing to Scotland in August 2002.
The e-mails show that Abramoff and Safavian, then chief of staff at the General Services Administration, were in frequent contact, played golf often and traded workplace gossip. Abramoff showered Safavian with offers of meals, invitations to parties as well as the trip to the fabled St. Andrew's golf course in Scotland.

OMG! Send funds to Democratic candidates, take to campaigning and canvassing in your area, help register voters in your neighborhood, write your congressmen, talk to friends and coworkers about the need for checks and balances in government. The rise of the Bush dictatorship has come!

I have never been a Republican, never voted Republican, and have always felt that Republicans must have basic character flaws that allow them to be selfish and heartless, but I remember well feeling proud of, and grateful for, John Dean during the Watergate debacle. I was proud of him for choosing to tell the truth when he could have lied to save his own hide, and his party's (empty) pride. I was grateful for him because he chose all of us, the whole United States, over his party and over covering his own ass.

He isn't a Republican anymore. He switched to Independent, but he is still conservative, still on the side of public policies I do not understand, and yet again the man comes out in favor of putting the wellbeing of the nation over partisan politics. He was treated by Republican senators as if he were low life when he came to testify in favor of censure. Men who are more fit for a jail cell than he ever was dare to try to besmirch him. Men who have helped turn our Legislative Branch useless, into a bribe generating rubber stamp machine, bellowing hubris about patriotism as they go, dare look down their noses at this patriot.

There's nothing wrong with true Conservatives, it's the neo-cons. They are not conservatives. I'm liberal on some things, conservative on other things.

But, the true conservative Republicans let the neo-cons and religious fanatics take over their party, and they ruined the Republican party for decades. And, I guess, they are guilty for letting that happen, and not policing their own party. It's probably more up to Republicans than anyone else to keep their own party clean. They let the Abramoff's, Bush's, Cheney's, Perle's, Wofowicz's, and the whole neo-con gang take over their party. A far cry from Barry Goldwater's party.

Sadly, I probably know more about the Republican Party, and the history of the Republican party, than today's GOP backers like Ricky, who just mouth whatever Rush Limbaugh says, and no nothing about history. Even their backers are a far cry from what they used to be. They were smart, made sense, and had good points. They are gone.

The ancient Greeks called it "hubris," that peculiar arrogance that leads a man to think that - no matter who he is up against - he will always emerge victorious. That the gods have blessed him and that destiny, rather than luck or diligence, accounts for his success.

Eventually, the man infused with Hubris gets ahead of himself and makes a fatal mistake. He thinks he's invincible and that no man can outmatch his prowess, his cleverness, or his pure, vicious ability to bear down on the enemy.

But, the man infected by Hubris never succeeds in outwitting himself. Eventually, this blind spot - the inability to act as a check upon himself - brings him down. History speaks volumes. Think Napolean in Russia. Think Darius against Alexander. Think the French at Dien Bien Phu.

George W. Bush is just such a man, infected by Hubris. It's very possible that between his arrogance and Cheney's cleverness, that they did come up with the perfect scheme: the "declassification" gambit that Ms. Pringle describes here. It's classified until they say it's not.

But, the crucial problem for a man influenced by Hubris is simple but deadly: he may think he's invincible, but there is always a weakness somewhere. Going forward, Achilles was invincible. But come at him from behind and there was that damned heel ......

Bush and Cheney may have found a very clever way to slide out of legally breaking the law here, but sawed off the branch they're sitting on nonetheless. The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that Bush supposedly declassified by telling Scooter he could reveal it was actually only partially declassified. That is, Bush declassified the parts that benefitted him.

So yes, maybe saying it was declassified actually *did* make it declassified, and therefore, Bush did not break the law. No crime here folks, just keep moving ........

But, what Bush didn't plan for is that by declassifying the parts that benefitted him, it would lead to others demanding he declassify the rest. But if Bush does that, then clearly, he's in deep trouble .... documents given to Fitzgerald as part of his investigation prove that the parts Bush released only justify Bush's claims about Iraq if you take them out of context. Put them in the context of the full NIE, and it becomes clear that Bush exxaggerated the evidence so he could go to war.

Clever as Bush and Cheney are, Hubris now has them in a trap. Their clever little gambit worked ("it's declassified if I say it is") but now, they're being pressed to declassify the full NIE. This can only prove that Bush lied ..... and that his lies led to a war that didn't need to be fought.

Nixon thought he could stonewall and get away with it but forgot about the tapes. Napeoleon thought he could beat Russia before the weather turned nasty but didn't count on the Russians burning the housing he would need when it did. The French built their fortress in a valley because they thought the Viet Cong could never get cannons onto the steep hills above them, then woke up to find themselves being bombarded. The British thought the same thing about Washington at Boston, then turned ash white when his guns appeared literally overnight. Bloody hell ! That just wasn't supposed to happen ......

The Hubristic man always forgets the one obvious thing that will always bring him down: his own sense of invincibility. In the case of Bush, he thought he could release only the parts of the intelligence reports that justified his version of the story and forever hold back the parts that prove just the opposite.

Bush assumed in 2003 that because he could smack Joseph Wilson and his wife and get the full weight of the government, the media, the RNC, and the chorus of right-wing banshees screaming "traitor!" and "terrorist" to back him up, that this would always hold true, and that in 2006 he would be long past the Wilson road kill and on to being the undisputed master of Iraq.

But Hubris has become his downfall .... the wannabe master of Iraq has morphed into the Bloody Clown of Iraq and now he's being forced, little by little, to give up the parts of the story he thought he would always be able to keep hidden.

Yes, technically, Bush may have plotted cleverly to sidestep the crime of revealing national security secrets, but he clearly never thought that one day, somewhere down the road, that *he* would be forced by events to justify his actions, that *he* would be forced to have to tell the truth. Oh no no no ...... Bush definitely did not plan for this. No man infected by Hubris ever does.

The Bible says "Pride goeth before a fall." Bush and Cheney supposedly read the Bible. So they should know what this means. But, of course they don't.

Before the Hubris can take full effect, the Bush&Co. seem intent on taking the country down with them, so desperate are they to hold onto power, deplete the treasury, pay off their corporate friends, carry out their ideological revolution and prevent themselves from being tossed in the federal slammer they will resort to just about any tactic. These guys have backed themselves into a tight political corner and are desperate and dangerous. Unfortunately for the World, Iran will be attacked setting off a chain reaction of dire consequences.

Hold onto your hats. We're in for a wild ride. Dr. Strangelove revisited - Stop worrying and love the bomb. George Junior can be heard screaming as he rides the missile !

Mike J.
Hopefully you'll read this and what I wrote on the Barbara Boxer thread. I ask you, did you read Dean's book? I read it when it first came out. He makes a very strong case against the amount of secrecy of this president. Do you think that EVERYTHING should be kept secret? Do you think that there is any potential for a president to gain that much power that the republic is no longer? Do you think that the Constitution is still relevant and in full effect? If so much is secret and only certain things are released, there is major potential for a skewed sense of the situation. You should read his book if you haven't already (which you probably haven't. I know Ricky hasn't.) Also, take a look at this site. It's about executive orders.

We can quibble over terminology all we want, but we are being pulled into Armageddon, like it or not. Where are our elected representatives in the chambers of the congress, now, when they are needed more than ever, to represent our will and values? Please, if you care about what is happening to our Earth, please, contact your "representatives" and demand that they represent you, a citizen. If they fail to, please do everything you can support their upcoming opposition. We can do this, folks! It's time we the vast majority got together and put things right, as the founding fathers surely intended! See ya in Pepperland...